Robert Hershon and Simon Pettet

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 6:30 pm, Dia:Chelsea

Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon’s fourteenth poetry book, Freeze Frame, appeared this year from Pressed Wafer. His other recent titles include Goldfish and Rose (2013) and Calls from the Outside World (2006), both published by Hanging Loose Press. Hershon’s awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts. As a founding coeditor of Hanging Loose Press, he is making plans for the press’s fiftieth anniversary next year.

At the Victoria and Albert

A sunny day at the V & A I am in the William Morris Tea Roomsurrounded by peacocks and paisleysand Andre and Donna, but I am the only onedrinking tea, because I try to do the right thingAndre is wearing shorts because of the recordLondon heat wave: 79 degrees

There is a painting: The Slaughter in Cologneof St. Ursula and Her 11,000 Virgins and the manager in me begins to worry about straightening this out

How do we know they were all virgins/whywere they in Cologne/what were their dinner plansHow do you kill 11,000 chickens or cows, much less virginsDid they struggle did they pray What were the last virgins doingwhile the first virgins bled /What do you do with 11,000 headsWhat do you do with 11,000 torsosHow many Huns can you fit on the head of an axeIs there a great hill in Cologne today whereflowers grow especially tall and devout

Once we were on the tube going to Andre’s in West Hampstead for one of Tony’s hearty New Zealand dinners and we were lost

I asked directions from a clerkish man in a tired suit andhe was helpful and we walked though the same tunnelsand boarded the same second train so Ijoked to Donna, Maybe we should take him along to dinnerand his eyes lit up at the prospect of an adventure, awayfrom Mum and the telly and I was filled with remorseAndre, we’ve brought a stranger to dinner and we’re allgoing to talk about plumbing inventories while savoring our Pavlovas/Would that have been so terrible

Now Wikipedia tells me St. Ursula probably never existedand her 11,000 virgins were a monk’s mistranslationfor an 11-year-old girl/and isn’t that enough beheading to commemorate/It didn’t take much to become a saintin those early days/ I myself honored St. Gottfried whogave a potato to a dog, but there’s no painting of thator of a dinner laid before a lonely man

I like to wander in the V & A and be by myself withthe entire history of wrought iron or blue glass orthe Saint George altarpiece. Life wasn’t all slaying dragonsHe died a complicated martyr’s deathDid they split him lengthwise and then behead him or the other way aroundTalk about overkill/And on this bright spring daybeheading remains a popular worldwide sport11,000 virgins? All in a week’s work

Simon Pettet

Simon Pettet is an English-born poet and long-time resident of New York’s Lower East Side. Hearth (2008), his collected poems, and As a Bee (2014), an addendum to his collected poems, were both recently published by Talisman. Talisman also issued his Selected Poems (1995) and the volume More Winnowed Fragments (2006). Pettet compiled and edited a selection of James Schuyler’s art writings (Black Sparrow, 1998) and coedited Schuyler’s posthumous poems, Other Flowers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), with James Meetze. He collaborated with photographer-filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt to create Conversations with Rudy Burckhardt about Everything (Vehicle, 1987) and Talking Pictures (Zoland, 1994), as well as a limited edition of Abundant Treasures(Granary Books, 2001) with the painter Duncan Hannah.